Drop Ship News

If you want to rock those ecommerce dropship sales during the upcoming holiday season, it might pay you to take a close look at how to use email marketing effectively.

Email marketing is extremely effective provided it is done right. In fact, it is one of the most effective marketing methods available to day for ecommerce and has a great ROI (Return On Investment) to boot.

The winter holidays are prime online shopping times for millions of people all around the world. You want in on the action, right? Sure you do! Read on to find out how to use email marketing to effectively increase your dropship home business sales this holiday season.

Here are a few tips and tricks that should help you optimize your email marketing for the holidays:

Make sure you have especially good offers and promotions going on in your dropship business during two of the biggest shopping days of the year---Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There will be a lot of consumers keeping an eye out for great deals and bargains, so you want to have something to offer them.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box when it comes to your marketing emails. You want a subject line that will jump out there and attract a viewer’s attention before they automatically hit the delete button and move on to the next email. Make it humorous, or outlandishly extravagant or perhaps a particularly lucrative offer….it doesn’t matter so much how you go about it or exactly what you say, the main idea is to get your marketing email opened and read.

Be sure to keep the main message of your holiday marketing emails “above the fold” which simply means in the top half of the message. It is much more likely to be read there in its entirety, which in turn will get readers to continue reading the whole message.

Always have links to your social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Encourage people to like and share so that you can extend your audience. The holidays are a perfect time to have contests and promotions on Facebook, especially. For example, you might offer free shipping to everyone who likes your page. Don’t panic---you won’t be losing money in for factor the shipping cost into the cost of your dropship products. Internet research has shown that shoppers are more likely to buy an item---even at a slightly higher price than a competitor‘s---if it comes with free shipping.

Take some time to clean up your subscription list. Verify email addresses, update new change of email addresses, thin out subscribers who haven’t opened any of your emails in a long time. There is a chance they might open yours during the holiday shopping season but it’s unlikely if they haven’t opened any in a couple of years or so.

This is a prime time to beef up your email marketing subscription list. Actively solicit those email addys! Offer some sort of incentive such as a percentage or dollar off amount on a purchase, for instance.

Anyone with a dropship business might be able to use these 7 ways to use email marketing effectively.

Email marketing is HOT with savvy ecommerce entrepreneurs, simply because it works. According to the Email Stat Center:

“56% of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013; email was second only to social media, which 60% of businesses said they plan to increase. SEO placed third with 41%. - iContact "The Small and Midsize Business Email Marketing Survey" (2013)

The top three marketing channels organizations are integrating with their email programs include website (75%), social media (56%), and events such as tradeshows, webinars, etc. (40%). - MarketingSherpa "2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report" (2013)

eMarketer expects there to be 216.6 million US email users this year, representing 89% of total internet users. Two out of three people in the US will be email users in 2013. - eMarketer "US Internet Users 2013: Solid, Saturated Market for Web, Search and Email" (2013)

Nearly all adult internet users, or 78.4% of the US adult population, will send an email via any device at least once per month this year. - eMarketer "US Internet Users 2013: Solid, Saturated Market for Web, Search and Email" (2013)

Consumers aren’t just accessing email using multiple devices. They’re also using multiple accounts. Almost three-quarters of US email users ages 25 to 40 managed their email this way, according to February 2012 data from BlueHornet. - eMarketer "Email Marketing Benchmarks: Key Data, Trends and Metrics" (2013)”

So, it is plain to see the value of email marketing. Now, 7 ways to use it effectively and get the most bang for your buck, so to speak.

1. Make sure your emails will get past the spam filters! Certain keywords, for instance, trigger a spam alert that can get your marketing email delegated to the spam folder or actually deleted before the recipient ever even sees it. Here are just a few of the biggies that will ring a warning bell with a spam blocker: free, clearance, money, save big money, incredible deal, bargain, cash, cheap and many more of that ilk.

2. Make it quick and easy for email recipients to take action---the desired action that you want them to take, that is. Be sure that your marketing emails load fast and that the subject line and the message of the email match.

3. Have a strong, clear call to action. Tell your email readers exactly what it is you want them to do. Have a clickable button that will allow them to take the desired action on the spot. There is no substitute for a good call to action!

4. Have a specified landing page geared to the specific marketing email. Don’t have subscribers click through and land on a page asking for all sorts of information. Don’t send them to your home page. Instead, have a particular landing page designed to complement the message and/or offer in your marketing email.

5. Try A/B testing. This means sending two different versions of a marketing email and then tracking results as to open rates, click throughs, purchases. This way , you can gain valuable insights into which marketing emails work the best for you.

6. Keep your main offer or promotion above the fold. This means on the top half of the page. This way, you can hopefully engage a viewer’s attention right off the bat and keep them reading.

7. Constantly work to beef up your email opt-in subscription list. Offer a nice freebie such as free or half price shipping, give freebies or promotions for referrals, have the opt-in form on several different web pages on your dropshipping site.

Use these 7 tips to use email marketing effectively for your dropship business and watch your sales soar skyward!

If you have a home dropshipping business, email marketing can help boost sales, so you might be glad to get a few useful tips for best practices that will ensure your emails get the best results possible.

First of all, let’s establish that email marketing is extremely effective. Many ecommerce entrepreneurs use email marketing for that very reason. Another great point about email marketing is that you can write them yourself if you feel competent. If you don’t feel that your writing skills are up to snuff, don’t attempt to write your marketing emails yourself. Instead, hire someone to do it for you.

Why?

Because sending people ungrammatical. Misspelled, poorly written emails would be worse than sending nothing. Your dropshipping business would come across as shoddy and second rate. You don’t want that. So, if you can’t write them well, don’t write them at all and get a freelancer.

Now, moving on to the tips for better marketing emails to build your dropshipping business, here they are:

Be sure your marketing emails are compatible with mobile devices. More and more internet users use their mobile devices to access the web and read emails. If your emails aren’t compatible with an iPhone, iPad or other mobile device, many of them won’t be read.

Use social media to drive your email marketing campaigns. By linking to social channels in emails, you ensure a wider audience.

Keep it simple. Your marketing emails should forego bells and whistles and go straight to the heart of the matter. Forget graphics and other distractions. Stick to a single column format for best results.

Forget using too much sales hype. But, isn’t that the whole purpose of marketing emails---to boost sales in your dropshipping business? Yes. However, people are tired of being bombarded by too much salesy content. So, try to go at things from an educational or informative approach rather than sales pitches. For example, if your dropshipping product is camping equipment and you have a new product such as an easy to set up camp shower; let your email tell the benefits to the reader of using the new camp shower instead of just trying to sell it.

Instead of mass mailing, move toward segmented, targeted marketing emails. This is where tracking and analyzing on your dropshipping website can come in extra handy. Keep up with who buys what and then target special promotions and emails especially for that group. For example, let’s say that you dropship outdoor products and have a group of customers who have bought boating supplies. You would target your emails to this group with promotions and emails about boating supplies and related products.

Don’t just ask for email opt-in subscriptions on the checkout or confirmation page or on your home page. Scatter them throughout your site but stay below the fold, which means on the bottom half of the web page. The top half should be focused on the products and the sale.

Use these email marketing tips to boost sales in your home dropshipping business!

One thing is for sure if you have an online home dropshipping business---you have to engage in marketing to keep traffic and sales flowing, so a few FREE tools to help you market your business might come in handy.

Marketing is crucial to the success or failure of your dropshipping business. The World Wide Web is a huge place and little old you can get swallowed up and lost in it more quickly than you might realize. So, getting the world out and some buzz going about your home business is critical to its health and prosperity---as well as yours.

There are tons of marketing tools available online and while there is no doubt whatsoever that some are well worth paying for, they might not fit into your operating budget right now, especially if you are just getting your dropshipping business off the ground. Sometimes you have to walk before you can run. This is where free marketing tools will be of great benefit to you!

Here are a few free marketing tools for your home dropshipping business that you might find quite useful.

You will find a veritable gold mine of useful marketing and analytics tools here that can help you immeasurably in the day to day operation of your online home dropshipping business. You get analysis tools, social analytics, mobile analytics, conversion analytics, content analytics and more. What a fantastic resource for any ecommerce entrepreneur who wants to have a profitable, thriving business!

Another treasure trove of valuable tools here from Google that will be a big help in showing you an overview of your home business. It can give you pointers on how to make your website more search engine friendly and can pinpoint problems that are hampering the user experience.

Use Google’s Merchant Center to submit your dropship product feeds so that they will show up in search engine product listings. Wonderful way to drive traffic to your products!

A/B split testing is important for marketing because it lets you know which promotion, email newsletter, coupon or whatever worked the best in terms of consumer participation. For example, let’s say that you compose two email marketing newsletters; each with a different subject line and variations on the content. You can then do A/B split testing to compare the two emails and find out which one had the better open rates and click through rates. Obviously, you want to stick with the basic formula of the winner.

Landing Page Analyzer: This one shows you how effective your landing pages are in terms of motivation, relevance, call to actions, hesitation and more. This can be a tremendous help to you in optimizing your landing pages to increase your conversion rate.

Idea Fox: Get some good ideas on A/B split testing, multivariate testing and more by reading case studies that are sorted by industry and problem type.

Test Duration Calculator: Great little free tool that tells you how many days you should run you’re a/B split test to get the most accurate results.

Use these free marketing tools to boost traffic and sales in your online home dropshipping business!

If you want to grow your home dropship business, one effective technique you can use is email marketing!

Email marketing is extremely effective as far as a marketing strategy and it can be quite cost effective, as well. Many ecommerce business people have discovered the power of email marketing and used it to make more sales and boost their bottom lines.

According to a recent study conducted by Silverpop about email marketing, there are benchmarks by which you can gauge all email marketing. Here are some interesting stats and info from this study:

Emails pertaining to consumer products had the highest scores for open rates---scoring an impressive median 25.4%.

When it comes to click through rates, consumer product emails were way up there near the top again.

Top performing categories such as consumer products have the lowest email bounce rates.

Looking at unsubscribe rates, consumer products fared very well again, with a mere 0.04%.

So, with your business in dropshipping consumer products of some kind, you’re basically a shoo-in for being successful with email marketing providing you pay attention to the details.

Dollar for dollar, email marketing is widely considered to provide the best ROI (Return On Investment) than any other form of marketing. Based on information from the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing consistently outperforms any other channel in generating income.

Take a look at this from the Direct Marketing Association:

Email: $39.40 for every dollar spent

Search: $22.38 for every dollar spent

Display: $19.71 for every dollar spent

Social: $12.90 for every dollar spent

Wow! It seems clear enough that if you have an online dropship business, you should be using email marketing!

Here are some tips for successful email marketing:

Don’t try to do it without outside help. Services such as MailChimp and Constant Contact are extremely reasonable and automated so that sending out big, bulk batches of marketing emails is easy peasy. Much, much easier and faster than you could try to do it one email addy at a time.

Be sure to stay within the guidelines of CAN-SPAM laws. Read the Bureau of Consumer Protection’s CAN-SPAM Act Compliance Guide if you are unclear about what you can and cannot do regarding marketing emails.

You should always design your marketing emails to be mobile device friendly. With more and more consumers accessing the internet with mobile devices, you need to be sure that your emails are mobile accessible.

Building your opt-in email subscription list should be an ongoing, high priority type of thing. You should actively solicit subscriptions, but don’t do it before a shopper completes the checkout process. Asking for too much info too soon, such as an email address, could cost you a sale.

Have a catchy subject line that will motivate recipients to open and read your marketing emails. Use buzz words that attract attention!

These tips for email marketing can help grow profits for your home dropship business, so get started today and watch those sales soar sky high!

Marketing is key in driving sales, so you might appreciate a few FREE ways to market your online dropship home business.

Any ecommerce entrepreneur in the know understands that marketing is essential to a successful, thriving and profitable business---online and off. If you fail to market and promote your online dropship home business, it will not be as successful as it could be---plain and simple.

Here are 6 free ways to market your dropship business:

I. Use content to market your dropship business by creating how-to pages on Wikihow or Ask.com. Of course, they need to be relevant to your dropship niche. If you are dropshipping lingerie, for instance, you might create an informative page that explains how to measure and purchase the correct bra size. This content will not only help you in Google search ranking, but also assist in setting you up as an authority within your dropship niche.

II. Start a business blog. Don’t go too heavy on the sales hype. Readers don’t like that and neither does Google and the other search engines. Instead, keep the content informative and interesting, making sure it correlates and is relevant to your niche. For example, if you dropship boating and water fun products, your content could be about all sorts of current news that pertains to these things.

III. Make a video. YouTube is extremely popular. In fact, videos of any kind are popular with online users, so produce one or more instructional or educational videos that are relevant to your dropship niche. You don’t need to be a Hollywood producer to create a good marketing video. Any video camera will do, or even a digital camera that will record for a few minutes. Don’t be afraid to inject a bit of humor into your marketing videos as these are the ones that are prone to go viral.

IV. Harness the power of social media through such sites as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. To give you an idea of how very popular Facebook is, there are currently 1.11 billion members. Just imagine how effectively you could market your dropship business on that site if you connected with a teeny fraction of users! Twitter is also hot, as is Pinterest.

V. Make sure that all of your pages have unique HTML page titles. Meta tags are still a basic and quite important element of best SEO practices, so don’t overlook them.

VI. Use press releases to market your dropship business. You can pay for press release services, but there are several good free ones, such as 24-7 Press Release. Naturally, you want to make your press releases relevant to your dropship niche. If you don’t know the proper way to write a press release, not to worry, it isn’t difficult and you can find plenty of free help online to show you a step by step process.

Use these 6 free ways to market your home dropship business and you might be surprised at how your sales will take off!

Did you know that you can use email marketing to grow your dropshiphome business?

It’s true!

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing techniques around and best of all; it won’t break your budget, especially if you can write the marketing emails yourself.

If you can’t, you can hire a freelancer or enlist the aid of a relative or friend who is willing to help for a small incentive.

Here are some tips to make email marketing effective for your dropship home business:

Always strive to get subscriptions to your email opt-in list. The more people who agree to receive your emails, the better off you are because you will be reaching out to a larger audience.

Be sure to include some sort of deal or promotion, or failing that; announce a new product you think your subscribers will be interested in hearing about. Remember that your subscribers, like just about everybody else on the internet, are bombarded with emails every day of the week. So, make sure you send emails that are of value in some way so that you don’t lose subscribers.

Make your subject line as catchy as possible. It needs a good hook, which means it needs to sound intriguing enough that your readers will be “hooked” and will open and read it. This is vitally important, so make it a priority.

Be sure to include the main message of your marketing email above the fold, or on the top half of the page. This is where it is most likely to be seen and keep people reading. Without this, your readers may gravitate away without reading all of your email.

Always address your recipients by name in marketing emails. This is a great way to connect with your customers and subscribers in a more personalized way.

Branding is important to your ecommerce dropship business and you should use it in your email marketing campaigns. If you have a logo, be sure to display it prominently at the top of the page so that people will recognize the email as coming from you.

How much is too much? As a rule, don’t deluge your subscribers with spammy emails. This is bad PR and will come back to bite you in the derriere if you aren’t careful.

Be sure to give your subscribers plenty of advance notice for your big holiday promotions and other great deals.

The flip side of that coin is to send a time sensitive offer from time to time that will be more likely to get action in a hurry. For example, you can offer free shipping for one day only or a similar incentive.

If there is one thing you definitely don’t want to overlook, it’s to make sure your email marketing messages are mobile device friendly. More and more people are using their mobiles for reading emails, shopping and everything else online, so you need emails that are compatible.

Using email marketing to grow and build your home dropship business is a smart move!

Did you know that you can build your home dropship business with video marketing?

Video marketing is an excellent and cost effective way to build and grow your home ecommerce dropship business. Videos are hot and almost all internet users enjoy watching them. This can be of great advantage to an ecommerce entrepreneur!

If you aren’t entirely sure what video marketing is, a simple explanation is to say that it is marketing using videos. Fairly self explanatory, really, as it actually is exactly what it sounds like.

Video Marketing Tips

Here are some helpful ways to use video marketing to build your brand and increase sales for your online dropship business:

How to videos are hugely successful. If you can do video marketing with some handy “how to” tips and tricks for your audience, you have a fair shot at gaining a large number of viewers.

Use humor in your video marketing. People like and respond well to humor. If you can make someone smile or laugh, they are more apt to like you and research has shown that in sales, people tend to buy from those they like. So, be likable with a funny video and make more sales.

Don’t be too salesy. This is a big mistake. Yes, you want to do video marketing to build your business, but you don’t want to come across as Crazy Eddie the Used Car Dealer, either. If your video marketing efforts are good, they will work to build your business without a lot of hype.

YouTube is a great platform for video marketing! In fact, you will likely get more viewers on YouTube than anywhere else, so be sure to post your video marketing productions there. You might be interested to know that YouTube gets more than 800 million unique visitors to the site every month. This should provide you with an idea of how much exposure your video marketing would get there.

Social media is another really good place for video marketing. Your business Fan Page on Facebook is the perfect place for your marketing videos. Ditto for Twitter!

Don’t try to get too fancy with your video marketing. Keep it real. You aren’t aiming for a Hollywood blockbuster, just a simple video that gets your message out there.

You can use a plain, no frills video camera, digital camera with video capabilities or if it’s a really short flick, your cell phone. If you’re reasonably careful about lighting and speak distinctly, you can produce a satisfactory video from any of these.

Be sure to link to other of your videos, this amplifies your video marketing efforts and will please the folks who are watching them to learn something about your niche or products.

Be sure to let viewers comment or ask questions. This is an effective way of using video marketing to help you connect with consumers and potential customers.

Video marketing can be an extremely effective way to build your brand, connect with the buying public, work some PR mojo and drive traffic to your dropship listings or business website.

Get started with video marketing today and who knows---you might go viral!

You may have seen the movie Field of Dreams with its famous quote about a baseball field: “If you build it, they will come” and think this is the case with your website, but it isn’t; so you might get some use from these 6 tips for marketing your ecommerce dropship business.

You can build the best website there could ever be, complete with all the bells and whistles, wonderful SEO and top notch products at bargain basement prices. But, if you don’t market that website, they will not come. Customers, that is.

Marketing, promotions and advertising….all of these is what helps to drive traffic to your dropship website so that you can sell your products.

Here are 6 tips for marketing your ecommerce drops ship business:

1. Use Social Media---Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are huge! In fact, at last count Facebook had over 800 million members and is still growing. Twitter has a respectable number of users, as well. These social sites are global, so you can reach out to a worldwide market of prospective customers if you hop on the social media bandwagon and harness some of that awesome power to market your dropship home business.

2. Use Email Marketing---Email marketing is an excellent, and low cost, way to get your message out there to consumers. Actively work on building your opt-in subscription list so that you have plenty of people to send your marketing emails to and drive traffic to your dropship business. If necessary, offer a small incentive for opting-in. You might give half price shipping on a future purchase or something along that line. The idea is to make the idea of joining your subscrip0tion list appealing.

3. Provide Excellent Customer Service---One of the smartest moves you can make to market your ecommerce dropship business is to provide exemplary customer service. This won’t cost you a dime! New customers are something you should always strive to get, of course, but repeat customers are golden. When you make an active effort to supply your customers with above average customer service, they will often become loyal, repeat customers. As if that wasn’t enough, they can also make fantastic brand advocates, providing wonderful advertising you don’t even have to pay for!

4. Be Mobile Friendly---If you haven’t already done so, make sure that your dropship business is mobile friendly. More and more consumers are using mobile devices to shop online and if your ecommerce site or listings aren’t mobile accessible; you’re losing sales and money.

5. Best Practices SEO---There are some who have said that with the advent of the Google Panda and Penguin updates, SEO is dead. Don’t believe it. SEO is far from dead and just as important as it ever was. So, be sure to make yourself familiar with the Google algorithm updates and then make sure your listings and website are optimized for them. Always remember the old e-tail adage---if you don’t exist with Google, you don’t exist. SEO will keep you ranking high in the search engine results, which means that people searching within your niche will see you.

6. Business Blogging---A blog for your ecommerce dropship business is a very worthwhile thing. Not only does it provide Google with the fresh, relevant, valuable content it wants for high ranking in search results, but it also helps open lines of communication between you and the buying public. If you start a business blog, be consistent. You need to post fresh content at least every day to be most effective.

Use these 6 tips for marketing your ecommerce dropship business and watch your sales skyrocket!

Did you know that email marketing for your dropship business can be tremendously effective; helping you drive traffic, generate sales and build your brand?

It’s true! Using emails to stay in touch with your customers, gain new customers and spread the word about your promotions and new products is an excellent---and extremely cost effective---way to make your home dropshipping business successful.

Benefits of Email Marketing

There are several benefits to email marketing:

Cost effective---If you can write the marketing emails yourself, it’s a very low cost way to market your dropship business.

Fast results---Email marketing usually delivers fast results, particularly if your email contains a dollars off coupon, free shipping, special sale price on a hot item or similar content.

Able to target---You can actually target your marketing emails to a particular demographic of customers. For instance, if you have customers on your opt-in email subscription list that bought Christian music from you a while back, you can send them emails showcasing your new CDs in this genre, or a sale.

Easy to track and measure---With many types of advertising, it’s difficult to gauge the ROI. (Return On Investment) But with email marketing, it’s easy to track and measure the success, or otherwise, of your emails. This can be enormously helpful to you in planning future campaigns.

Helps build repeat customers---While you always want to strive for new customers, your repeat buyers are worth their weight in gold. Why? Because according to internet retail analysts, it’s six to twelve times less expensive to sell to a customer you already have then make a sale to a new customer.

Those are only a few of the many advantages of email marketing for your dropship business.

Email Marketing Statistics 2012

The results are largely in for email marketing stats from 2012. Here are some interesting factoids that will help you realize what is going on with email marketing in the B2C, or Business to Consumer, sector:

If your email subject line has a $ sign, it has an above average chance of being opened.

If you’re actively marketing for mobile device users, as you should be, it may help to know that approximately 14% of email opens and clicks on mobile devices occur between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. The second biggest peak email open time, with a 12% share, happens between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.

If you wonder whether your marketing emails should contain special offers or not, here’s a stat that should resolve that issue for you: 58 percent of people say that getting discounts and special offers is the number one reason they subscribe to emails from businesses.

There is no doubt about the effectiveness of email marketing to grow and build your home dropship business, so get started today mapping out your next campaign and get ready for more traffic and sales!